Looking back on “This Year’s Model” — or even finding anything relevant to say about it, regarding the plot or its characters — is difficult because this episode leaves so little impact on the viewer. After I finished watching it again in honor of its 10th anniversary, I wondered if the running time was somehow shorter compared to the rest of the Season One episodes.

“This Year’s Model” was written by Laura Kightlinger and Glenn Eichler. Even though Kightlinger would move on to write six episodes of Will and Grace, she is known more for being a comedy performer than a writer. At the time of the episode, her only writing experience was sketch comedy writing for Saturday Night Live.

She had never written a beginning-to-end television script or a screenplay, and Eichler’s co-writing credit most likely exists for one of two reasons. Either she needed Eichler’s guidance in completing her first full script, or more likely, the script needed extensive revision, to the point that Eichler deserved a writing credit. This would be the only Daria episode that Kightlinger would write.

To recall the plot: The show begins with a pointless scene in Daria’s room where Daria and Jane watch a commercial for an encyclopedia — one whose articles are written by a supermodel. (This scene could have been abandoned, as the title of the episode alone makes the subject matter clear.)

Two visitors arrive at Mr. O’Neill’s class, led in by the principal, Ms. Li. The male is Claude, and the female is Romonica DeGregory, two representatives from an agency that seems to take various names throughout the episode, all variations on “Amazon Modeling Agency.”

Brittany is very happy, figuring they must be there because of the letter she sent to them. Claude and Romonica make it clear that they are searching for modeling talent, with the winner to receive a national contract.

Daria and Jane each make the point to Ms. Li that the aims of modeling aren’t exactly aligned with the aims of education. Daria states that modeling is entirely about being judged by one’s appearance, and that a model’s popularity depends on the whims of popular fashion.

Daria and Jane finally learn that Ms. Li is more motivated by financial renumeration — the swimming pool needs bullet-proof skylights — than any educational benefits from Amazon’s arrival.

At the cafeteria, Daria and Jane find that Jodie has skipped lunch and they accuse her of being caught up in the dream of becoming a model. Jodie complains that Daria is “against everything” and that the class is voluntary. Daria retorts that by Jodie’s argument, strippers should be allowed to come to recruit at the school as well, provided attendance at stripping lessons is also voluntary.

Both Claude and Romonica show up unexpectedly at Mrs. Bennett’s class. By now, Brittany is wearing a shoulder-to-knees trenchcoat, and when Claude and Romonica take notice of Brittany, they ask her to model for them.

Brittany is wearing an haute couture dress underneath the coat and walks for the two, who silently indicate to each other that Brittany doesn’t measure up, being too busty. However, Claude and Romonica effusively compliment Brittany (“Wonderful!” “Astonishing!”) and search the room for new talent.

They center on two potential targets. Jane holds off Claude’s and Romonica’s interest by drawing them on notebook paper as two vultures circling a potential meal. When Claude focuses on Daria’s “waif-like figure” and asks her to take off her glasses, she declines, stating that she needs them to identify scam artists.

Daria shares her concerns with Helen and Jake, who know Daria feels strongly about the matter. They know because Daria has violated her “unwritten rule” (see the essay on “The Invitation”) and upset the balance of power by the mere act of telling her parents. Quinn, however, enters the room with what she thinks is good news — she’s been invited to attend Claude’s and Romonica’s modeling class!

The phone rings. Romonica is on the phone to talk with Helen. She tells Helen that Quinn has that “special something” that most other girls don’t have, and emphasizes that the classes are free.

Quinn, still thinking that she isn’t going to the class after the poor initial reception to the idea from Helen, leaps in after Helen and Romonica stop talking. She claims that Helen has always said that Quinn can be whatever she wants to be, and clearly, this is something very big for Quinn.

Helen reluctantly gives in, if only for the one class. She then swings a deal with Daria to observe the class and monitor Quinn. (The deal: Helen cannot bring up redecorating Daria’s room — the padded room of the schizophrenic relative of the previous owners — for an entire year.) As it turns out, Daria had planned on attending anyway, as there is great “potential for the total humiliation of Quinn.”

As Daria and Jane sit in the school auditorium and watch Quinn on stage, Trent shows up. Daria and Jane ask why he’s there, and Trent states — not very convincingly — that as he plans on being a rock star, he needs to get used to being around models.

As Brittany bemoans her fate of having to sit with the “losers” in the auditorium, Quinn, Sandi, Stacy, Tiffany, and a large red-haired girl (chosen as “a decoy” by Claude and Romonica) strut their stuff.

Quinn is very good at interpreting the directions. However, Claude and Romonica create an exercise where the girls must rub the chests of “virile” young men in a romantic way. The Three Js are called to help, and Kevin is noticed in the auditorium and asked to help as well, immediately abandoning a sobbing Brittany. The boys take off their shirts and get to work, but Ms. Li shows up and the class comes to a crashing halt.

Quinn is convinced that she’ll win the contest, but Helen is not so sure. As the school is assembled in the auditorium to hear who will win the modeling contract, a group of men dressed in army fatigues and military wear interrupt the assembly. It is General Buck Conroy from Brutal Mercenary magazine, ready to tell the assembled the joys of being a killer for hire.

When Ms. Li protests their intrusion, Conroy shows Ms. Li not only the letter she supposedly sent him, but the accompanying fee. And then the press show up. (Ba-rump-bum.)

Ms. Li can provide little defense to the press — after all, if she allowed Amazon to recruit, then why wouldn’t she allow Brutal Mercenary? Claude and Romonica are banned from school grounds.

At home, Quinn believes that she would have won the contract if all this hadn’t happened. Daria then happily points out an article in the local paper where it is announced that Amazon has signed a Lawndale student to a national contract — Kevin Thompson.

As Daria, safely in her room, destroys her copy of Brutal Mercenary magazine — indicating that she was the force behind the arrival of General Conroy and his mercenaries — Kevin is being verbally abused by Claude and Romonica during an underwear shoot. Clearly, he’s not doing very well as a model.

Part of the problem with “This Year’s Model” is that Daria and Jane — the stars of the show — are shoved off the stage, moved from a proactive role to an observing role. At the beginning of the episode they are watching television, and they will remain in this passive role almost to the very end.

Daria at least remains true to her standoffish self. Daria doesn’t like the arrival of Claude and Romonica, and has probably judged them accurately as “scam artists,” but doesn’t go out of her way to lead a massive protest. As long as she’s not involved, she’s happy, and she only observes the modeling because there’s the faint chance that her hated sister Quinn might do something foolish.

But with Daria out of the way, the episode must be carried on the back of lesser — far lesser — characters. Claude and Romonica take the stage, and they are both the stereotypes of what people in the modeling industry were thought to be like in 1997.

Both are flamboyant, both are dressed in visually arresting (or assaulting) fashions, everything is tres chic to them, they are catty, they are dishonest, and they enjoy making grand spectacles of themselves. We can only be glad that America’s Next Top Model was not on the air until 2003, or we would have been given bad imitations of Tyra Banks and Janice Dickinson.

The problem is that neither of them is very funny, either separately or together. They are a bad Saturday Night Live sketch. Daria and Jane quickly fend off these two annoyances, but we are stuck with them for the length of the episode.

With Daria’s principle of non-involvement running at full power, other, lesser characters have to fill the spaces. For example, Quinn, who by this time was still not much more than Daria’s sisterly nemesis. And of course, Kevin and Brittany, of whom the less is said the better.

A general rule of Daria episodes is: Don’t bother watching episodes, like “A Tree Grows in Lawndale,” which try to develop stereotypical characters — they never work. “This Year’s Model” not only proves the rule, it doesn’t even do much with the characters it’s given, for comedic purposes or otherwise.

Furthermore, Helen is very angry with Jake and it’s the first time we truly experience Helen’s wrath in any episode. Helen is virtually screaming at Jake — “Do you hear anything that goes on here?!?” — and Jake frankly doesn’t know how to defend himself, wanting nothing more than to be left alone.

Helen’s irritation with Jake stops being funny after a while, and when it does, you begin speculating who’s to blame for the sorry state of communication in the Morgendorffer household ... Helen or Jake?

This episode is the first sign that this shtick, taken too far, can be troublesome. It’s a good thing that the Helen/Jake dynamic is further explored in later episodes. In “This Year’s Model,” however, it’s more verbal abuse than it is humor.

As a side note, Trent’s arrival at Lawndale High is a bit unsettling. Why is he there? The natural conclusion is that he’s there to look at the cute high school girls — although Quinn and her Fashion Club peers are freshmen, and Trent is in his early twenties.

Not that it’s a sin to look at pretty girls, but you wonder if Trent’s interest in Daria is due to the fact that he can’t pick up girls his own age. If Trent is to be the boy that Daria develops a crush on, wouldn’t someone as smart as Daria be asking herself some questions?

Even Trent seems embarrassed to be there. Maybe he read the script.

The ending is unsatisfying. Really, if Daria detests Quinn so much, it should be a win-win situation — either Quinn loses the competition and is crushed, or wins it and is out of Daria’s hair. But Daria somehow acts as the deus ex machina, finally bringing an end to Claude’s and Romonica’s reign of ... uh ... inconvenience.

Why does Daria have all this concern now? One could argue that she was really worried about Quinn falling under the influence of these two dimwits, but nothing in the episode conveys that.

It also leaves a bunch of unanswered questions, as Hermes Conrad might say ...

• Did Daria spend her own money? That fee looked like a check. It must be a money order, because where would Daria get an anonymous check?

• Did Daria need to steal official LHS stationery?

• Is copying Ms. Li’s name a crime?

• Didn’t General Conroy have any suspicions? Why would he show up unannounced without at least doing some basic reconnaissance? Did Daria call him up pretending to be Ms. Li? Did ...

Oh, forget it. None of these unanswered questions are worth asking, or answering. “This Year’s Model” was one of the first real bumps on the road, right next to “College Bored.”

It was just a episode with broadly sketched characters, none of whom can draw a laugh, while Daria sits in the background, somewhere, reading. Clearly, this episode needed more Daria. Thankfully, the next two episodes of Daria would be among the funniest.

Random thoughts:

• When I talked my essay over with my wife, she gave me a different perspective. As to whether or not Amazon was on the up and up, she said, “Of course Amazon is a scam!”

She compared Amazon to the Barbizon Modeling School. There are still Barbizon agencies at various places in the United States. Their old slogan was “Be a model, or just look like one!” One used to find their advertisements in Seventeen, Glamour, or Mademoiselle.

If you could somehow afford their classes, that was where they got you hooked. The classes were expensive, and then you could pay for a special class in how to apply makeup, and then pay for portfolio pictures, etc., etc.

However, Barbizon was not a modeling agency. They couldn’t place you on a runway, either in Milan, or for that matter, in Macon. Young deluded kids pay thousands of dollars and have nothing to show for it. This is why my wife concluded that Daria went out of her way, not only to reveal Ms. Li’s own “mercenary” behavior, but also to strike back at a place like Amazon/Barbizon.

My argument is that I doubt a lot of the young people watching in the late 1990s, or even in the 2000s on The N, would even know who or what Barbizon is. This is the problem when twenty- and thirty-somethings are trying to write a show for high school teens.

• Even though being a model was just one of many of Brittany’s most important dreams ever, at least she put enough thought in it to come up with a model name, “Blue.” Last Wednesday, the models of America’s Next Top Model were asked to come up with a new name for themselves as a challenge. (See: Twiggy.) Unfortunately, none of them picked “Blue.”

• A pattern is evident in Daria’s and Jane’s confrontations with authority. Daria will devastatingly point out the flaws in the opposition's argument, while Jane will bring up other related points that might paint a shocking picture. Daria likes unsettling authority, but Jane likes watching it squirm.

• When the Fashion Club is holding hands in this episode, waiting in anticipation of learning who will get the contract, Tiffany is missing. Did she fall short?

• Stacy finally gets a name, as Romonica calls her by name in the auditorium. Sandi was first named as a character in the previous episode, “Malled.” Tiffany still doesn’t have a name, but will have one by the end of the first season.

• The only good lines of the episode:

Quinn: You don’t get it. I’m writing a poem about what a great model I’d be. I’m going to recite it for Claude and Romonica. (clears throat) “A model’s what I’d like to be / Looking good comes naturally / Da da da da, da da, me.”

(Jane refers to Brittany’s characterization of the observers as losers, and Kevin is called to the auditorium floor by Claude and Romonica, abandoning a distraught Brittany)
Jane: Don’t be sad. He’s with the winners now.

Labels: Eichler, Essays, Kightlinger, This Year's Model

Today is the 10th anniversary of the first airing of “Café Disaffecto.” One of the hardest parts of writing about this episode was establishing an overarching theme, and evaluating the rest of the episode by how the components support or detract from that theme.

I then realized that this doesn’t work for “Café Disaffecto.” The reason why is that “Café Disaffecto” wasn’t supposed to be about anything. There was not supposed to be some cryptic inner meaning, no heavy philosophical ponderings. It was supposed to be a lighthearted and fun episode, and in my personal opinion, it was the first successful episode written by Glenn Eichler.

At the beginning of the episode, thieves toss a brick through the window of Lawndale’s cybercafé alt.lawndale.com and make off with valuable computer equipment. The business closes shop, and Mr. O’Neill concludes that the shutting down of alt.lawndale.com is an assault on the heart of the community of Lawndale itself. He bemoans the loss of the café in front of his class, but his students are ambivalent at best about the loss of alt.lawndale.com.

Daria is (unfortunately) queried as to her own opinion about the incident and she states that the ambience of the café could be replaced by putting a coffee machine in the computer lab. Mr. O’Neill somehow interprets this as being a call to create a coffeehouse, complete with poetry readings, in place of the shuttered cybercafé.

Mr. O’Neill’s quixotic quest draws little interest from Daria until Quinn’s mention of the Fashion Club at home prompts Helen to ask why Daria can’t be involved in such extracurricular projects. (If Helen knew the exact details of the Fashion Club’s “extracurriculars,” she’d make Quinn wear a chastity belt.) Unless Daria finds some outside-of-school involvement that she could put on a college application, Helen “suggests” (read: threatens) to send Daria to music camp during the summer.

All Daria can remember about music camp is the endless practicing of “Pop! Goes the Weasel” during the brief time she played the flute. To avoid a fate worse than death, Daria “volunteers” for helping with the new coffeehouse, but avoids Mr. O’Neill’s call to perform. Instead, she agrees to help with fundraising by selling candy, and sways Jane from her disinterest in tagging along by noting that as candy salesmen, they’ll get to look inside other people’s houses.

While Kevin and Brittany end up at an unhappy Mr. DeMartino’s door, and Quinn uses role-playing to become a successful salesman of phone cards, Daria and Jane end up at the door of Mrs. Johansen, a morbidly obese woman very interested in purchasing candy from Daria and Jane. Mrs. Johansen wants to buy all of the candy, but mentions that her doctor said she shouldn’t have “too much” chocolate, and later passes out from overexertion.

When she comes to, Daria has misgivings about selling the woman any candy at all, even as Mrs. Johansen insistently agrees to purchase candy at a high markup. Mrs. Johansen becomes quite belligerent, but Daria states later that “the chocolate would have killed her,” and Daria and Jane leave the angry Mrs. Johansen behind.

Daria and Jane are both called into Ms. Li’s office. All Principal Li can understand is that a woman was willing to pay for chocolate beyond cost, and Daria and Jane refused to sell it to them. When Daria states that they were afraid of killing the woman, Ms. Li tells them that because they refused to make a sale to a customer, they cannot claim extracurricular credit for fundraising for the coffeehouse.

Not wanting to return to the Morgendorffer household and have no defense against the threat of Music Camp, Daria reluctantly agrees to gain her credit by performing at the coffeehouse. The question is, can Daria find something to perform that won’t deliberately alienate the customers and the school authorities, but still allow her to be Daria? Daria tells Jane that she will write something new.

The opening night is no great shakes. A punk rocker sings a crappy lyric and smashes his guitar, Brittany’s plans for performing the balcony scene of “Romeo and Juliet” fall apart because Kevin forgets his lines, and Andrea gives the customers a view of her particularly dark universe.

This leaves Daria, who reads from her newest story “Where the Future Takes Us.” It starts out briefly with a vapid statement about the challenges students face in the future, but rapidly turns into something more interesting: a story about a spy called Melody Powers, who bloodily dispatches communists in the Cold War era. The crowd cheers Daria’s work, which inspires the attending football players to riot, as they march down Lawndale’s streets looking to stone the Russian Embassy. (There are no embassies anywhere in Lawndale, the local paper notes.)

Mr. O’Neill is forced to shut down the coffeehouse, lest it become a “base of operations for political extremists.” Daria, however, finally has her extracurricular credit.

Before the closing credits run, a brick is hurled through the coffeehouse window and a thief makes off with the espresso machine. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I was mentioning “Café Disaffecto” to my wife, Ruth, and one of her first observations was “That episode is so dated!” And it is dated. Undoubtedly, many of you 17-and-18-year-old readers might have no idea what a cybercafé is! Some explanation:

Early in the days of the Internet — I’m talking 1995 or 1996 here — a good desktop personal computer could set you back about three thousand dollars. Thus, instead of purchasing an expensive computer, you could just “rent the Internet” by going to a cybercafé and renting time on a personal computer. Before you jest at the suggestion, Janet Neilson (Canadibrit) spent much of her time at cybercafés and was quite productive as a fan-fiction author. (I do not know whether coffee was served.)

Today, the cybercafé is deader than dinosaur shit. PCs are cheap and almost everyone has a laptop. The closest thing to a cybercafé these days is Starbucks, and everyone there has brought their own personal PC. The only thing a modern-day thief would be able to steal at a Wi-Fi hotspot would be bandwidth, and he’d steal that hiding with a laptop in a parked car.

However, we do come to a few conclusions beyond the obvious. The episode establishes that Mr. O’Neill is not just a horrible self-esteem teacher — he’s a horrible teacher, period. He commits all the major sins: He doesn’t remember students’ names, not even after he’s had a long time to interact with them. He speaks in a sort of self-improvement “cant” that precludes true human involvement. What’s worst of all, he substitutes the real needs and opinions of his students with his own needs and opinions.

One suspects that Mr. O’Neill had the idea of a coffeehouse percolating (so to speak) in his mind for a time after learning of the theft at alt.lawndale.com; when Daria expressed her opinion about the matter, he substituted his opinion for Daria’s!

I always figured that if confronted with a modern-day Mr. O’Neill, I could do what Jane suggested — “Just enjoy the nice man’s soothing voice.” But after “Café Disaffecto,” I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of students left the class with a loathing of literature in general, and of Mr. O’Neill in particular. The man deserves the lack of respect he gets from his students.

We do see a situation where, once again, Daria is compelled to do something she’d rather not do. But unlike earlier episodes, Daria has more choice in the matter. She could have done anything else other than participate in Mr. O’Neill’s coffeehouse dream, but decided that this would be the most convenient project. Furthermore ... this time Daria actually brings Jane along with her in a scheme!

This episode also portrays Daria, and other supporting characters, in a bit darker tone than usual. (Is this Eichler being influenced by his Beavis and Butt-head days?) And I’m not talking about Andrea’s coffeehouse poem. Rather, the bizarre scene with the morbidly obese Mrs. Johansen and Daria and Jane. Johansen passes out and Daria and Jane have this discussion as to what to do next:

Jane: We should be doing something right now. I’m sure of it.
Daria: Yeah, I think you’re right.
(Silence. Jane lifts up her instant camera to snap a picture
of the unconscious woman. Absolutely no concern about
Johansen on Jane’s part.)

But the pure strength of the episode — one of the reasons why fans make this one of the favorite Season One episodes — comes from the fact of many very funny lines. A sample:

Kevin: Daria, you’re a chick, right?
Daria: Why? You have a biology test today?

Mr. O’Neill: I think what’s most disturbing about this crime is the symbolism involved. Don’t you agree, Jane?
Jane (deadpan): No.

Mr. O’Neill: Right here and now, let’s pledge to make Daria’s dream a reality.
Daria: You mean the one where people walking down the street burst into flames?

(Mrs. Johansen has passed out)
Daria: Uh-oh.
Jane: Did she hit her head?
Daria: I don’t think so.
Jane: Do you know CPR or anything?
Daria: I once gave the Heimlich maneuver to Quinn.
Jane: Did it work?
Daria: She wasn’t choking.

(About Daria’s and Jane’s refusal to sell Mrs. Johansen chocolate)
Ms. Li: How do you know it wasn’t for her family?
Jane: She has no family. She ate them.

Ms. Li (to Daria): You do want this extracurricular activity, don’t you?
Jane (quietly to Daria): “Pop! Goes the Weasel!”

(At Brittany’s botched Shakespeare reading)
Brittany: “Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
Kevin: I’m right here, babe!!

All in all, definitely some very funny stuff. It might not be a very deep episode, but “Café Disaffecto” is worth a refill.

Random thoughts:

• One of the earliest Daria fan sites, run by Katherine Goodman, was called alt.lawndale, obviously inspired by this episode.

• The alt.lawndale.com comes from the naming conventions of Usenet (which is also deader than dinosaur shit) and from the .com suffix appended to Website addresses.

• We learn that Kevin has a computer. What does he use it for? Undoubtedly nothing educational. Maybe it’s loaded with “Madden ’97.”

• There are lots of firsts in this episode: first appearance of Mrs. Johansen, first speaking appearance of Andrea, and the first mention of the infamous Melody Powers, who leaves a trail of dead men wherever she goes. Melody is sexy, and willing to kiss and kill, very much unlike her creator.

• You can’t say that Quinn is completely brain-dead — not only is she perfectly up to date with fashion, but we find out that Quinn is a master salesman.

• The appearance of the muumuu-clad Mrs. Johansen adds a Fellini-esque element to the episode, leading me to think that Eichler is flashing back to his days with Mike Judge. However, in my opinion, nothing beats Mr. DeMartino holding a conversation with Kevin and Brittany at his front door — while wearing a chef’s toque blanche and holding a frozen chicken. That’s wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind. I’ll bet, however, that Mr. D’s chicken would do a better job at memorizing Shakespeare than Kevin Thompson.

Labels: Cafe Disaffecto, Eichler, Essays

... an old essay that was once published elsewhere, but never for the Internet. Enjoy!

I’ll name myself “heretic” and “unclean” by stating to Daria fandom ...

I don’t care for “Esteemsters.”

There, I’ve said it. Feels good, too. I’m sure, however, that there are several people who agree with me. Those who don’t agree deserve an explanation of why I feel this way.

This is not to serve as proof for once and forever that “Esteemsters” is a bad episode. It might even be your favorite episode. But I don’t care for it. Here’s why.

The problem is that I thought that Daria would be another version of Beavis and Butt-head, which centered on one smart girl instead of two very dumb boys. You would never think that Mike Judge, who created a show about two dumbasses and their immaturity, would be a masterful writer — but he was.

As for people who had watched Beavis and Butt-head and looked forward to Daria catching some sunlight of her own ... well, coming from Mike Judge to Glenn Eichler, they were bound to be disappointed.

People who have never seen Beavis and Butt-head might believe that she was a major player in B&B. She wasn’t. She was one of those intriguing but underused characters — the “Andrea” of Mike Judge’s “Beavisverse.” Daria had some strong competition in B&B — Daria was no irresistible force, but the boys were definitely immovable objects. They made fun of Daria at every opportunity.

Daria, in turn, blew off the insults and could make her own sly counter-comments that the boys probably wouldn’t understand even if each comment were explained to them. Daria was never really in the “down” position in Beavis and Butt-head, and despite the constant chants of “Diarrhea, cha cha cha,” you got the sense that Daria was a smart young girl who could hold her own.

But what a different world it is in “Esteemsters”! From holding her own against the two chief protagonists in Judge’s cartoon, Daria finds herself barely eking out survival against much weaker characters. Shallow Quinn is the one that rules Lawndale High, and Daria is the “problem child” in her own home.

Hell, Daria’s even an outcast in Mr. DeMartino’s class, and she tells her parents that “My history teacher hates me because I know all the answers.” She gets dumped into the geek cage of Mr. O’Neill’s self-esteem class. From the perspective of a B&B fan, Daria has been exiled to Hell.

The character design isn’t as rich as that in Beavis and Butt-head. Those who aren’t familiar with B&B might think that the crispness and fine lines of Daria are a big improvement over the muddied look of B&B. Yet, amongst the Earth-tones of B&B, every background character radiates personality.

The other classroom characters in B&B looked tougher — like they could eat Andrea and anyone else for breakfast. Each one told a story the second you laid eyes on them. Here’s the tough guy who works out. Here’s the Punk Girl, and here’s Trailer Trash. They were all mysterious, intriguing.

Background characters in Daria — the extras we see walking behind Daria and Jane, the nameless ones — have very little character, and nowhere is this more evident than in the self-esteem class, where every loser looks more or less like the loser sitting nearby. Even Jane doesn’t stand out as anyone to whom you’d pay closer attention. Indeed, Jane sounds more like Trent than like Jane — if the voice actor can’t find the personality, what are we to conclude?

It begs the question of what Eichler, who wrote “Esteemsters,” wanted to prove.

His supporting characters are no great shakes. It’s hard to play Daria as a strong character when so many of the supporting characters are so one-dimensional, and “Esteemsters” is Exhibit A. Contrasted with Kevin and Brittany, any character from Beavis and Butt-head with a grain of intelligence would come off as an intellectual dynamo.

And what might have been! Andrea and Sandi, two characters with interesting personalities of their own, have a grand total combined of one line during this episode. Mack and Jodie aren’t even on the scene. Nor is Upchuck with his sleazy charm. Aside from Jane, the only students we get to know are Kevin and Brittany. Helen’s control mode and Jake’s clueless mode are only just powering up, and Quinn is as shallow as she ever would be in Seasons One and Two, if not more so.

Having Daria the outcast is one thing; having her outclassed and exiled by such poorly defined or developed characters is something else entirely. If their popularity or shallowness were a symbol of some deeper, darker force at work, I could understand, but that is clearly not evident.

Even if Daria truly reigns triumphant, what kind of victory is it? It’s the fish-barrel-gun syndrome. What kind of victory is it defeating such cardboard cutouts as these?

The problem is that we get no impression that anyone in this series can be anything other than what one’s first impression implies. All of Judge’s characters — even the stereotypes — had some reason for existing besides providing a cheap laugh for his main characters, Beavis and Butt-head. Every character that Judge created held the kernel of a developed character.

By contrast, “Esteemsters” introduces us to Kevin and Brittany, who — in five seasons! — never truly found their voices. Indeed, characters in Daria seemed to develop rather painfully, and seemingly with a lot of resistance from the writing staff.

Daria was always a good series, but never on the level of the greatest cartoon series ever. Why? I can give you several reasons — named O’Neill, DeMartino, Kevin, and Brittany. You can come up with answers of your own. Coming from Beavis and Butt-head and Judge’s four years of interesting characters, it’s a real comedown.

Furthermore, the script for “Esteemsters” is just not that funny. Of course, everyone quotes “I don’t have low self-esteem ... I have low esteem for everyone else.” But can you really name ONE other funny line for that episode? It holds truly few memorable quotes.

Entire scenes fall flat, their only apparent purpose being to move the plot forward. The entire Daria-meets-DeMartino/Kevin/Brittany scene could be cut out and I doubt that it would be missed. Trust me, we’ll get plenty of time to see these less-interesting characters as plot fixtures in other episodes.

Still, the episode has its moments. O’Neill’s final self-esteem test is a classic exchange that, when read at Outpost Daria, never fails to bring a smile. My favorite moment was when Daria turns Quinn’s “only child” quote against her at one of the family dinners — Daria knows just when to twist the knife.

But when all is said and done, “Esteemsters” is a big disappointment and one of the reasons I didn’t return to Daria until around the end of Season Three or the beginning of Season Four. It is a sub-par episode, a poor way to begin such a wonderful series.

If they could have only begun with “The Invitation,” the subject of my next essay.

Labels: Eichler, Essays, Esteemsters